Kindle Paperwhite review [1.5 years later]

Hi heya hello! I thought I’d update my thoughts on my e-reader now that I’ve had it for a good while. If you want to see my first impressions, you can read about them here. In this post, I’m going to touch up on things I didn’t talk about in my first review.

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First, to summarize my first impressions:

• didn’t like how it couldn’t read .epub
• wanted buttons to turn the pages instead of swiping
• expensive
• good for reading indoors
• light and portable
• battery lasts a long time

Verdict: the Kindle Paperwhite has changed my reading life for the better!

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Even after 1.5 years, I still love my Kindle. I’ve used it pretty much every night since I’ve gotten it. I still think the price point is quite expensive, but in the long run it’s worth it. I got the version that allowed Amazon to show promotions on my Kindle (because it was ~$35 cheaper than the no-ads version). At first I was worried there would be ads everywhere, but frankly I barely notice them. They usually pop up on the lock screen and at the bottom of the home page. They don’t show up when I’m reading, which is all that matters to me.

I said in my first review that I wanted the Kindle to have a night-mode option (black background and white text), and now they do! I guess a lot of people wanted the option because Amazon eventually updated the Paperwhite to invert colors.

I’ve built up my library over the months, and I like to sort my e-books with collections to make them easier to find. I didn’t mention this before, but I wish the Paperwhite allowed readers to have collections within collections. I organize my e-books by genre, but sometimes I want to include sub-genres or have collections dedicated to a certain series or author. Right now that isn’t possible, but I hope it will be in the future.

I still wish there were buttons to turn the pages, but now for a different reason. I’ve had this problem with a lot of touch-screen devices where they had a hard time sensing my pointer finger. In the past I chalked it up to be because of the callus that formed from playing cello. However, I haven’t played in a couple years, and the callus is long gone. The Kindle sometimes doesn’t register that I swiped to turn the page, and I’ll have the swipe a couple times (or with a different finger) before it realizes what I want. This might just be a me problem, though. I’ve just learned to press a little harder when I use my pointer finger or just use a different finger entirely.

One thing I love about this e-reader (especially during quarantine) is that I can read the e-books I borrow from my library on it. In the past I had to use my phone and now I don’t have to do that anymore! Huzzah! It’s so nice to have all my reading material in one place.

I talked about how I wished Kindles could read .epub files because I had some e-ARCs and e-books that were sent to me directly from the author/publishers that I wanted to include in my library. Thanks to a lot of lovely people who commented on my first review, I was made aware of Calibre, a program you can download to your computer to convert reading files. It covers a bunch of different types of files, but I mainly use it to convert .epub to .mobi. Nowadays, though, a lot of publishers/authors offer .mobi files of their books, so I don’t have to use it as much as I did before.

The battery still lasts a long time. I only have to charge it once or twice a month, and usually it’s around 30% when I decide to charge it. The fact that I always have the backlight on and don’t have to charge it frequently makes the battery life seem more impressive.

Verdict: I still love the Kindle Paperwhite. It’s a convenient and portable way to read e-books without killing your eyesight. Sure, it has it’s flaws, but it makes the overall reading experience very easy. I was skeptical of e-readers at first, but now I’m very glad I bit the bullet and bought it. Plus, this year I have a goal to buy less physical books, and this will help me with that.

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Hope this post helped a little bit in learning about Kindle Paperwhites!

Do you have an e-reader? Which kind? What are your thoughts on it?
Do you prefer hardcovers, paperbacks, or e-books?

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Stay awkward and amazing! ❤